Livebinders

I have so many bookmarks, most of which are education related. When I stumbled upon this website, I couldn’t believe my luck! It would seem that most of the educational community has already discovered this amazing resource, but it’s new to me (and many other teacher’s I’ve talked to) so I decided to review it today anyway.

Livebinders allows you to store websites, pdfs, word documents, and images in a convenient digital binder that is stored online. Best of all, you can share these web-binders, with anyone you like, and you can search for other public binders that have already been created.

The technology: Livebinders

My impression:

I just started using livebinders last month, but I’m already excited about it. The possibilities to teachers are pretty amazing. Thus far I have limited myself to creating a digital binder for each of my courses to share with my students and their parents. I’ve linked these binders on my class webpage, and they’re already getting a lot of use. Parents love being able to access currciulum documents, rubrics, and assignments so easily. As an added plus, I haven’t had a student come to me saying that they’ve lost (insert assignment/rubric/resource here) because they’ve been able to access them online and print off a new one.

Putting the livebinder together was pretty easy. I used the livebinderit tool which allows you to add websites while browsing, and before I knew it I had a huge resource for my courses.

For the most part the website was easy to use, but there were a few tricks that I had to play around with a bit to figure out. I also had some technical problems trying to upload documents. Regardless though, I think this program would be easy to teach students and parents how to use, and it makes sharing information online easy and organized. Not only that, but think of the paper you could save!

Possible uses in the classroom/ Lesson ideas:

Other than having resources for each class like I do, livebinders would be perfect for pooling together information for an assignment or test review, or posting letters or notices to students and parents. Another great application would be to have students create a livebinder for an assignment or portfolio.

Pictures:

Instead of a picture, here’s a video from Livebinders that shows how it all works:

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Thanks so much for reviewing LiveBinders! We are constantly looking for ways to improve the product. Do you remember the areas that were harder to learn? We would also like to hear about the problems that you had with upload. Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated and can be sent to support@livebinders.com

Thanks for posting this and for helping us spread the word about LiveBinders.

[I will send this to your support email address as well, but wanted to respond here for anyone else reading]

As I mentioned in the review, I found the process of adding websites to tabs and subtabs to be pretty intuitive, it was some of the more advanced functions that I had to look around for a bit. For instance, I think it would make more sense to have an upload button right on the page rather than having to open the edit menu.

As another example, I love that you are able to put a Google calendar into your livebinder, but I think the process could be simplified a bit as well. Perhaps this problem could be solved by including more tutorials on your website. I had to go searching for this information elsewhere on the web, and it would be nice if it was included right on the website.

As far as the problems I had uploading, I’ve had an error message come up probably about 5% of the time I try and upload something, I don’t recall exactly what the error message says, but next time I get it I’ll send you a message. I thought at first that it might have been my internet connection but had the same problem at home as at work.